head to head · open source
scrapy vs ketch
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ketch has 590 stars, 36 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 10,814% (64,394 vs 590 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; ketch is written in Go under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, ketch 6%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (scraping, web-scraping), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| scrapy | ketch | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 590 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 36 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick scrapy if
- You weight community size — 64K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ketch if
- You want the ketch feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ketch fits your workflow better
About scrapy
Scrapy is a web scraping framework written in Python, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license, and described in its own README as a tool to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform and requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is maintained by Zyte, formerly known as Scrapinghub, together with a broader group of contributors, and it lives in the Python ecosystem as an installable library rather than a hosted service. Its repository is roughly seventeen years old, which places it among the longer running projects in the web scraping space.
read the full scrapy overview →
About ketch
ketch is a stateless command line tool that performs web search, code search, library documentation lookup, and page scraping from one Go binary, built for both people working in a terminal and the AI agents they build.
read the full ketch overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or ketch more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and ketch has 590. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and ketch free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and ketch under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and ketch?
scrapy is written in Python and ketch in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, scrapy or ketch?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose ketch if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.